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“An oriole?” She shrugged. “A Baltimore oriole. It’s the first embroidery pattern little girls learn where I’m from. After the alphabet, of course, and the usual flowers.”
“That’s right,” he said, his voice low and lazy, “you’d rather be in Baltimore. Do I assume that’s where you’re from?”
She heard his questions as conversational, a way to fill the spaces of time that were as empty as their stomachs. She hesitated over her usual impulse to pretty up her background, but the coziness of the campfire, which contrasted with the vast ocean of emptiness around them, prompted an honest response.
“From a farm just east of Baltimore,” she said. “It’s at North Point on the Chesapeake. I have many friends in Baltimore, though, and often go into town for one reason or another.”
“And now you’re on the road to Oregon,” he observed. “What did your family grow on the farm?”
“Years ago—well before I was born, that is—it was tobacco. When the Maryland farmers were undersold in that market by the Virginians and Carolinians, the profit seemed to be in the staples, corn and kale and the like. More recently…”
He finished her statement. “More recently there was no profit to be had in anything.”
She stared into the flames and watched a succession of miniature jewel gardens grow and die. It was pointless to deny the obvious. No one left a home when it was comfortable or a business when it was profitable. The original colonists hadn’t been landed gentry or moneyed merchants when they had left England, and their descendants weren’t fat cats leaving the East, either. The word depression had been circulating in The Baltimore Register with ever more frequency, along with installments from Samuel Parker’s guidebook to the Oregon Territory.
It had taken only a recent letter from Laurence’s wife, Cathy, reporting on the success of their apple tree farm out west, for Morgan and Barbara to decide that they had worked too hard for too long to have so little. Before Sarah knew it, the Harris family was packed up and ready to go. They were the first in their neighborhood to leave the old soil for greener pastures, but every farmer and shopkeeper in and around Baltimore had heard the enticing reports of the Oregon climate and the timber.
Sarah was of a mind to tell Mr. Powell that she had not been obliged to undertake this journey because she was poor. Oh, no! Mr. Powell should know that she had a very fine trust fund on which she could live in the style she deserved and which had been provided her by the widow of her father, the illustrious General Robert Ross of the British army.
Now, Mr. Powell didn’t need to know that she wouldn’t come into the money before she was twenty-five. Neither did he need to know that Mrs. Ross had threatened to close the account after those catty British “ladies” had tried to ruin Sarah’s reputation when she had visited Mrs. Ross two years before. And he certainly didn’t need to know that Morgan and Barbara had refused to borrow a penny against the future of that money and that their refusal hurt her in a peculiar sort of way. She knew, however, that to say any of this would leave her open to embarrassing questions.
She looked up and repeated, “No, there was no profit to be had in anything.”
If she thought she was going to avoid embarrassing questions, she was mistaken. Powell, who was thoughtfully chewing his berries, asked next, “You’re traveling with your sisters, no?”
“That’s right. I have two.”
“Older? Younger?”
“Both younger. Helen is sixteen and Martha is fourteen.”
“Which makes you—”
“One and twenty, Mr. Powell.”
“Hmm. I see.”
There was something in the way he said, “I see,” that made her think he saw nothing at all. She knew what he was thinking, and it was exactly what that hateful Mrs. Fletcher had said when she had met Sarah. Upon inquiring about Sarah’s age, Mrs. Fletcher had smiled sweetly and said, “Oh, I see, my dear. You must have suffered a disappointment in love. No? Well, why else would a woman of your age be accompanying her parents to begin a new life on the other side of the continent?”
Sarah could restrain her vanity no longer. “I’ll have you know, Mr. Powell,” she said, “that I turned down a very good—no, an excellent offer of marriage hardly more than a month ago, and so you needn’t think that I came on this trip because…because I was unable to situate myself or anything of that sort!”
Her vanity was hardly appeased when Powell asked, “Why didn’t you find a way to stay with one of the many friends you have in Baltimore, if you didn’t choose to be traveling now?”
Because none of her friends had turned out to be true friends. After Sarah had turned silly William down, she found that the doors to the houses of Olivia and Isabelle and Claire didn’t open so readily or so widely for her anymore. Never mind that they were as stuck-up as they were rich. And they had been jealous of her from the start. Oh, yes, jealous.
She said primly, “I don’t like to impose,” and had to swallow her pride to see the smirk of understanding cross her companion’s stubble-darkened face. It was difficult to determine which was the more unpleasant circumstance to bear at the moment: her exhaustion, her hunger, the memory of being so thoroughly snubbed, or the company of this impossible man.
“And you, Mr. Powell?” she asked, gathering together the tired remains of her dignity. “What brings you to these inhospitable parts?”
“The U.S. government. I’m a surveyor.”
The vision of a precise surveyor jarred against her continuing image of him as a man-beast. She was surprised into asking, “Your studies in surveying informed you of how to trap and skin a rabbit and how to build a fire from sticks and iron pyrite?”
He shook his head. “A year of being in the field has done that for me.”
“Nevertheless, I don’t suppose when you chose such a…a respectable profession that you ever imagined finding yourself captive to bloodthirsty Sioux squaws.”
“I’ll admit,” he said, “that I never imagined the surveyor would be regarded as the Indians’ worst enemy.”
“How so?”
“The hunters they dislike. The pioneers, too. But the man with the magical instruments who looks at their land—just looks!—and works for the Great White Father back in Washington…this man they hate. And, perhaps, rightly so.”
“Speaking of the Indians,” she said, looking nervously over her shoulder into the blackness, “I’m wondering whether this fire, as useful as it is for scaring away the hungry animals, might not alert any unfriendly humans to our presence.”
“Right again, Miss Harris, and I’m none too pleased about still finding myself in Sioux country. So before I set about making the fire, I gave a couple of owl hoots, since to the Sioux, the hoot of an owl is the sign of death.”
“That was you?” she replied, amazed. She had heard an owl a while back and, unlike a Sioux, had been comforted by the familiar sound of it. “You seem to have learned a lot of skills in a relatively short time.”
“Since boyhood I’ve been able to hoot well enough to get answers from owls.”
“Where are you from, Mr. Powell?”
“Everywhere, Miss Harris, and nowhere.”
Thereafter the conversation didn’t flourish, and she was inclined to think that they were protected as well as could be expected from their predators, whoever and whatever they might be.
After a while, Powell got up and left the campsite. Sarah felt a leap of panic at his departure and had to suppress a desire to ask him if she could accompany him. After all, he hadn’t followed her when she had had occasion to disappear once or twice behind a bush during the course of their long walk, nor had he said a word about it. Still, it was dead of night, the prairie wolf was stalking them, and this was Sioux country. She glanced at his bed of leaves and thought it was distressingly far away from her own bed. However, to suggest making his any closer to hers was unthinkable.
So she drew herself away from the fire and fairly crawled back to her bed. She lay down on her back, intending to turn on her side, but once down, she couldn’t move another muscle to turn over. She was captive to the leaves, imprisoned in a body that was not dead but not fully alive, either. With every sense stretched well beyond tiredness, she lay there with her eyes open, her gaze lost in the snarls of the wood and leaves above her head.
The shadows hidden in the branches mingled with the sneaking glow of the dying fire to create weird mind pictures of prairie wolves, of Sioux warriors with feathered arrows cocked in drawn bows. Of William down on one knee, taking her hand in his, begging her to be his wife. Of the flick of her wrist, that one, brief gesture containing both her surge of triumph and her loss of desire to ever see him again. Of English aristocrats paying her extravagant compliments in darkened corners and then pawing her breasts. Of hoot owls.
The next thing she saw were the sun’s rays breaking through the branches above where she lay. She sat straight up, draining the blood from her head. She was woozy from bad dreams and the realization that the sun was already well up in the sky. She ached everywhere in her body, but mostly in her heart, and when she looked around and saw that Mr. Powell’s bed of leaves was empty, her aching heart nearly failed her.
She wanted to call out for him, but didn’t dare. A moment later she was glad she had kept quiet, for she saw fresh sticks neatly laid for a new fire a few feet away from the previous night’s fire. At the base of Mr. Powell’s tree she spied a folded white shirt, a pair of moccasins, her laceless ankle boots, a laced pair of men’s boots, a few rolled-up strips of white cotton and the torn shawl, atop which glinted a small object she recognized as her scissors. Relief sloshed through her, and she was able to conclude that Mr. Powell was at the spring, most likely bathing.
Given that, she decided to wait for his return to the campsite before going to the spring herself in order to wash. The evidence of the newly laid kindling suggested that he might have found some meat to cook. She was so cheered by the possibility that she decided to make herself useful. She got to her feet and hobbled across the campsite to retrieve Mr. Powell’s shirt and her scissors. Then she hobbled back to her bed, sat back down, opened her reticule and began to mend the tear in the upper left front panel of Mr. Powell’s shirt.
She engrossed herself in her task and was, perhaps for the first time in her life, soothed by the activity of threading her needle, of setting tiny stitches, of snipping finished ends, of making inyisible knots. She saw the head of a delicate golden orange bird come to life beneath her fingers, sprout a wing, perch on the beginnings of a leafy branch. She let her thoughts roam where they willed. They fixed, pleasantly, on the happy reunion she would soon have with her mother and father and Martha and Helen.
Mr. Powell returned to the campsite. She didn’t look up at him, absorbed as she was in her handiwork. She heard the small sounds of him lighting the fire and the subsequent snaps and crackles of the flames. Presently the aroma of jackrabbit drifted over to her and brought a watering in her mouth.
“I’ve roasted meat on a stick for you,” Mr. Powell said to her at one point, “and placed it away from the fire on these rocks. You can have it when you’re hungry.”
“I’m hungry now,” she said, still not looking up.
“I don’t doubt it,” he said, “but you’re right not to hurry, since we can’t move out of here for quite a few hours yet.”
She was in her black threads now and began to place the beak. “Just like yesterday, then?”
He grunted his assent “The terrain in these parts doesn’t provide enough cover for us to travel during the day. I’ll do what I can to sniff out the trail of the wagons over the next few hours, but I’m limited in my movements because of that prairie wolf and my lack of a knife. Not to mention the Sioux.”
“I’ve got a bit of work left to do on your shirt,” she said, “and could probably spend the day embroidering, if I had enough thread.” She held his shirt away from her and regarded it critically. She turned the shirt toward him, then finally looked up. “You see—” she began, and got no further.
He was squatting down before the fire and balanced on his heels just as he had when she had last seen him, but there the resemblance between the Mr. Powell of last night and the Mr. Powell of this morning ended, and she wouldn’t have known him for the same man if she had not already heard his voice. When she looked up, he met her regard, and her overall impression of him now was that he was much younger than she had guessed, although she had not previously considered him old. She was frankly astounded to discover how thoroughly a shave could transform a man. His face wasn’t handsome—she wouldn’t go so far as to say that—but it was…compelling, in a masculine sort of way, all flat planes and clean angles.
His eyes were blue. She had noticed that right away, along with the fact that he was unusually sharp-sighted. But now that his blue, sharp-sighted eyes were focused on her in inquiry and no longer bloodshot, they had a quite distinctive effect. His hair was different, too. She wouldn’t call it precisely tamed, but he had evidently washed it, and it was still slicked back from his face and only just beginning to curl as it dried. Then there were his broad shoulders and his muscular chest, which tapered down to a washboard stomach. She had already discovered how strong he was, but she couldn’t quite understand why she hadn’t made a connection between that strength and the physique that matched it This lack of connection was all the more curious given the fact that when she had first laid eyes on him he had been naked.
At that she blushed and had the presence of mind to hold the shirt in her hands up in front of her face. She cleared her throat. “You see what I’ve been doing,” she tried again. “What do you think so far?”
He did not immediately respond. In fact, the silence was prolonged enough to give her time to recover her complexion and to peek around the side of the shirt.
He was staring open mouthed in amazement, but his expression was not that of pleasant surprise, nor did he seem particularly impressed with her unexpected skill with a needle.
“I asked you what you think, Mr. Powell.”
He closed his mouth, then opened it to say, “It’s a bird.”
“An oriole, yes. I told you so last night.”
“I didn’t think you were serious about putting it on the shirt.”
Any trace of embarrassment vanished. This was the Mr. Powell she knew. “It’s a rather fine start I’ve made, if I do say so myself,” she said sweetly, and fixed him with a well-practiced gaze that blended mild puzzlement with entreaty. “Do I take it that you have some objection to the improvement that I’m making?”
Chapter Five (#ulink_3f1c7184-d078-504b-aebf-85d3ed639280)
He might have predicted that the beautiful idiot would end up doing something idiotic while he was gone from the campsite. She was an irritating woman, no doubt about it. A tricky one, too, and he didn’t want even to begin to respond to the look in her big brown eyes, no sir, or imagine how many men had fallen victim to it. And although he was able to recognize the not-so-subtle manipulative intention of that look, its effect on him was in no way lessened. It reminded him that a year in the field was a long time—
He shook his head to clear it. “I object to wearing a shirt with a bird that belongs on a sewing sampler.”
“I think you should know, sir, that this pattern represents a skill level well beyond that of the sampler. It is found on parlor pillows in the best houses and on napkins, linen napkins.”
“Especially a bird that’s surrounded by all those curlicues.”
“Those are to become mimosa flowers,” she informed him. “I have hardly had time to finish the entire pattern, so perhaps it’s premature of you to judge it at this stage. The pink of the flowers will nicely complement the golden orange of the bird’s body, while the brown of the branch balances out the white and black of its head and wing feathers.”
“Does it have to be so big?”
“Well, this is about the size of the design as it figures on parlor pillows.”
“Ah, but I suppose that on napkins, it would be—” He broke off.
There it was again, that look. “You were saying, sir?” That voice, too. Sweet enough to melt a foolish man. “Something about napkins?”
This was a ridiculous conversation, and he wasn’t going to pursue it. He needed a shirt, and it looked as if he was going to have one with an orange bird, surrounded by pink flowers, poised to chirp its silent song across several square inches of his upper left breast. He exhaled gustily, slipped the suspenders hanging down at his sides over his shoulders and rose to his tender bare feet.
“Let me know when the shirt’s ready,” he said. “You can eat whenever you want.”
He retrieved his moccasins and was at the edge of the campsite when she stopped him with the words, precisely enunciated, “Do you mind telling me where you are going, sir?”
Yes, I do mind. “Is there a specific reason why you need to know, ma’am?”
“Since I wish to bathe at the spring, I would like to be assured that we do not get in each other’s way.”
He should have guessed. “I’m going to check out possible wagon tracks and trails. Since I can’t move out in the open for any considerable length of time, I’ll be gone several hours at least, but won’t be able to cover much more than a mile or so.”
“And if the prairie wolf comes, should I chip stones again?”
He nodded. “Keep the fire going, too, or start another one for practice. Remember never to make two fires in one place. That will make it easier to cover our tracks before we move on out of here later today.”
As he was leaving the campsite in a direction away from the spring, he heard her say, “If you’re worried about not quite striking the right fashion note with a beautiful oriole on your shirt, I might remind you that your present outfit is far more stylish than the one you were wearing when I first saw you.”
He crunched his way through the trees, grumbling to himself. This was hardly the best start to a day that was sure to be as grueling as the one before. He was in better shape, though, much better shape. After the beautiful idiot had fallen asleep the night before, he had boiled some water and put some snakeweed in it. Then he had soaked his feet in the concoction and slept with his soles wrapped in sage leaves. This morning, although his feet were far from healed, they were no longer stabbing him with pain. Since he wouldn’t be doing much walking today, mostly waiting, he figured his feet would be even better by the time of the evening’s trek.
As a man from everywhere and nowhere, he liked to plot people and places in precise positions on the various mental maps he held in his head, and he knew just where to put Miss No-First-Name Harris with her postures and her pretenses and her embroidery scissors. He knew her type. Hell, he had been given birth by her type. The lack of physical resemblance between Miss No-Name and his mother wasn’t going to mislead him, and he’d have to remember his mother’s jet black hair and sapphire eyes every time he looked at Miss No-Name’s golden curls and twist-a-man-around-her-little-finger brown eyes. He indulged fellow feelings for the poor fool who had extended her the supposedly excellent offer of marriage she claimed to have turned down—and even dared to wonder if she had received such an offer. But why had a farm girl from the Chesapeake taken a trip to England with a chaperon?
He didn’t know, and he wasn’t going to spend the day thinking about her, especially not thinking of her bathing in the spring. Better to think of where he was and what he was doing, and that was surveying the one hundredth meridian. Better to find a place to hide in the occasional sprigs of vegetation where he could calculate the slant of the sun and plan his moves to coincide with the slow shifts of shadows. Better to wonder why white men wore black trousers, the kind that didn’t blend into any daytime landscape.
Now that his senses were returning, he was interested to find out what happened to his telescope and his chain and his level, not to mention what might have happened in the meantime to the rest of his team of three other surveyors. However, he wouldn’t be able to retrieve his instruments in the Sioux camp or restore himself to his team until he had returned the beautiful idiot to her family.
Full circle. Begin by thinking about a woman. End by thinking about a woman. Maybe it had something to do with having been stripped naked, made to face certain death, and then being reborn. But how long was he—were they—destined to survive with almost no resources in the middle of hundreds of thousands of acres of wilderness? Make that several millions of acres. He didn’t know exactly how many, and it was the job of the surveying team to establish that number. The odds against him accomplishing his part of the mission now were high, and here he was a good hundred miles east of where he had last seen his team, with no equipment, no horse, and in the company of an irritating woman who seemed to think that their life-or-death circumstances made a good occasion to embroider.
He eventually found a miniature scarp in the seemingly smooth grassland in which he could nestle himself. Lying horizontally, he shared this patch of earth with creeping critters and stared at the sky, which was three hundred and sixty degrees of clouds, packaged like a drawing-room gift assortment of mare’s tails and cumulus and cirrus, with an occasional dark storm cloud resting on a silvery gray pedestal of rain afar off to the west. He brought his gaze down to the horizon and chose a fixed point in the middle distance upon which to base his estimates of the wide spaces yawning around him. He took his time and arrived at what he knew would be a remarkably accurate estimate of fifteen miles to the slight rise of land on the western horizon.
This neat trick of spatial approximations was one he had taught himself as a distraction during the regular beatings he brought upon himself at the military academy. Over time, he discovered that he was good not only at the small-scale calibrations he had performed in the confines of the Correctional Chamber but also at the mapping of larger spaces, where plane geometry no longer applied and the curvature of the earth came into play. When he had surpassed his cartography teachers in precision, the beatings stopped, and he was sent to the War Department and the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C.
He calculated and waited, moved and calculated, waited some more and moved again. He spied what might have been fresh wagon tracks, but didn’t risk following them. Instead he simply calculated their direction and figured in the possible ground that had been covered in the past forty-eight hours. The possibility danced around the edges of his busy brain that Miss No-Name’s family had backtracked to find her. However, it seemed more logical, since she was the one who had been spared from attack, that her parents would do their best to arrive at the next meeting point and wait for her there.
That is, if they were still alive. And if they weren’t, he was stuck with her.
He had seen what there was to see, so he headed back to the campsite. This took enough time to imagine a variety of scenarios for how she had spent her day, which included her being foolishly preyed upon by the prairie wolf and bathing in the spring. The image of her bathing in the spring seized hold of his imagination but was instantly replaced, upon his return to the camp, by the combination of her with the prairie wolf.
He came upon the campsite from the direction he had left it, and the first thing he saw was Miss Harris standing in the center of the little clearing with her back to him. Her spine was rigid, and she was looking straight ahead of her. She was wearing her bonnet, and her clothes looked fresh but slightly rumpled in a way that suggested that she had washed them and dried them in the sun on rocks. Across from her and facing him was the prairie wolf, who had ventured right up to the edge of the opposite side of the campsite. He was a scruffy, pitiful excuse for a wolf, but he was more than a match for a human. His ears were cocked, his right foreleg was raised, and he had a wary look in his eye, as if he was waiting for his best moment to pounce. Or was he, incredibly, about to retreat?
In that first half second Powell realized that the beautiful, blessed idiot was trying to stare the damned prairie wolf down. In the next half second, he realized that she was winning the war of nerves.
The scene unfroze. Powell moved forward. The prairie wolf turned tail and ran. She whirled at the sound of his footfall behind her and clutched her heart.
“Oh, it’s you!” she exclaimed under her breath. “You scared me!”
“I scared you?”
“Sneaking up on me like that. I didn’t hear you.”
“A wise man doesn’t announce his arrival anywhere in these parts,” he replied, “but as for being scared, I would have thought our mangy friend did that for you.”
She let her hand fall to her side. “He was playing a game of hide-and-seek with me on the edges of the trees there for a good long while. I picked up my rocks, and I would have thrown them at him if I had had to.” She gestured to the rocks at her feet. “I decided not to go on the offensive, recalling what you said about your feeling, so I dropped them and figured that my best strategy was to stand my ground here in the center.”
